THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

You didn’t know that the famed Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s was home to some noted mystery writers? Editor Penzler, try as he might, won’t do much to convince you.

The paradox here is that although half the volume’s 12 reprints are well-known anthology pieces, none of them exactly establishes their authors as significant crime writers. Alexander Woollcott’s suave anecdotes, “Moonlight Sonata” and “Rien Ne Va Plus,” and Marc Connelly’s equally slight “Coroner’s Inquest,” all go by in a flash. Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde” lacks mystery, crime or suspense. And how many readers would call Ring Lardner’s “Haircut” a crime story? The prize among the obligatory items is S.J. Perelman’s sublime Raymond Chandler parody, “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer.” Penzler rounds the volume out with two other, lesser Perelman burlesques (the tedious “Up the Close and Down the Stair” and the livelier “Four-and-Twenty Blackjacks”); a pair of workaday send-ups by Robert Benchley (“The Mystery of the Poisoned Kipper”) and George S. Kaufman and Howard Dietz (“The Great Warburton Mystery”); and two undistinguished stories that at least belong in the genre: Edna Ferber’s “The Man Who Came Back” and Lardner’s “Stop Me—If You’ve Heard This One.”

Penzler’s introduction and headnotes conscientiously recycle the most enduring clichés about the Round Table wits’ backbiting and their lack of major literary success. Even the collection’s title is recycled.